Cannibal Club (1863)
Let’s clear the air, here: The Cannibal Club did not consume human meat. It’s not one of those clubs, thank goodness. Its official symbol is a mace carved to look like a man chewing on a human thigh bone (in the most racist way we can imagine in modern times). But the club was more interested in the practice of cannibalism.
Luckily, none of the members were known to have actually partaken in this taboo. Yet even the club’s interest in cannibalism is questionable. Dane Kennedy’s biography of its founder, Sir Richard Francis Burton, makes the Cannibal Club sound more like a bunch of guys getting together to talk about things like ethnicity, sexuality, and other areas where they held opinions that would shock ‘polite’ society.
